Last week, the co-founders of the Koch-funded Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson and Niel Patel, took to their website to ask a burning question: If climate change is our World War II, who are the real villains?
According to these two men--who, just to be perfectly clear, created a website funded by the fossil fuel-dependent Koch network that regularly pushes climate change denial and runs cover for the fossil-fuels-first agenda of the Trump administration--the people who are “first on the list” of enemies are “double agents… people who pretend to be on the side of righteousness but in fact are doing the work of dark forces.”
Specifically, they call out former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his lavish billionaire lifestyle. Oddly, Carlson and Patel make only passing reference to the fact that Bloomberg has given hundreds of millions of dollars to projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And it’s not like they’d have to go far to find examples of his climate philanthropy” the Daily Caller itself appears to have over 600 stories on Bloomberg and climate.
But because Bloomberg flies in private jets, apparently all that is meaningless.
Now, Carlson and Patel could have done some quick back-of-the-envelope math to compare Bloomberg’s personal flight emissions with the number of coal plants the Beyond Coal campaign he supported successfully shut down. But that would be actual, like, journalism, and not just a rambling screed making the most basic hypocrisy argument possible. Also, it’d probably prove that he’s more than offsetting the emissions from his flights.
Badfaith “Mr. Gotcha” hypocrisy allegations aside, isn’t it a bit weird that Carlson and Patel think that the “first on the list” of climate enemies are the people they describe as “quislings, after the Norwegian collaborationist leader”?
You would think the people first on the list would be the ones who are openly making the problem worse, and profiting off of it. To carry forward their WWII metaphor, are Carlson and Patel suggesting that the people who collaborated with Nazis were actually worse than the Nazis themselves?
Well, probably, yes, that probably is what they’re saying. And it makes sense that they’d consider the fossil fuel profiteers and Nazis to not be so bad. After all, fossil fuels keep the site funded, and Tucker Carlson defends white nationalists, embraces white nationalist conspiracies, and is beloved by white nationalists and their websites, a culmination of years of descent into white supremacy. And v the Daily Caller itself has published a slew of white supremacists.
So all that’s missing from Carlson and Patel’s column is a reference to the classic Mitchell and Webb bit. The one about Nazis’s obsessions with skulls, and their dawning realization to the answer of the question:“Are we the baddies?”
Yes, Tucker, you are.
